Professor Phillipa Darbre, a biochemist at Reading University, was the first to raise the issue twelve years ago: that underarm deodorants might be implicated in the relentless rise of breast cancer in the Western world. However, the medical establishment did what it always does when confronted with evidence that might harm the commercial establishment with ties to the drug industry: it trashed her research. But she has stuck to her guns.

Her original concern was that the chemical culprit in deodorants is parabens, an anti-bacterial preservative, but less well publicised has been her pointing the finger at aluminium. Aluminium compounds are the key ingredients in deodorants, as they are powerful anti-perspirants.

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“Aluminium is known to have a genotoxic profile, capable of causing both DNA alterations and epigenetic effects,” she reported in the Journal of Inorganic Chemistry in 2005, “and this would be consistent with a potential role in breast cancer if such effects occurred in breast cells. Oestrogen is a well established influence in breast cancer and (our results)… demonstrate that aluminium in the form of aluminium chloride or aluminium chlorhydrate can interfere with the function of oestrogen receptors of MCF7 human breast cancer cells both in terms of ligand binding and oestrogen-regulated reporter gene expression”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16045991.

Two years ago she reported having confirmed the presence of aluminium in breast tissue, with the even more worrying discovery that at the cellular level it can “increase the migratory and invasive properties of MCF-7 cells, suggesting that that the presence of aluminium in the human breast could influence metastatic processes. This is important because mortality from breast cancer arises mainly from tumour spread rather than from the presence of a primary tumour in the breast,” she warned. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2389619

Until now, Darbre has been something of a lone voice, and so easily dismissable as a bit of a nutter. But this month, cancer experts at the University of Geneva announced that they had 100% confirmed her discoveries in experiments on mice.“Our findings demonstrate for the first time that concentrations of aluminium in the range of those measured in the human breast fully transform cultured mammary epithelial cells, thus enabling them to form tumors and metastasize in well-established mouse cancer models” they reported in the prestigious International Journal of Cancer. “Our observations provide experimental evidence that aluminium salts could be environmental breast carcinogens.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27541736

My father always told his two daughters that underarm deodorants are dangerous. He could never explain why, but simply said that "nature makes you perspire". I use a cotton wool pad soaked in apple cider vinegar.